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“... now editing the Spectator under an assumed name. Yet there have been no serious efforts from the Ridley camp to claim that their man was misquoted or that any breach of professional ethics took place. Not only is this the sort of thing he says: he must have supposed that it was opportune, or at least safe, to say it while the tape-recorder rolled. This is ...”

“... capital; managers who failed to achieve this target would be sacked. The report, drafted by the MP Nicholas Ridley, recognised that the pressures to economise would inevitably threaten management-union conflict. In sectors where a Conservative government could not contemplate the political or economic costs of such conflict, ‘return on capital figures ...”

“... since the 1980s.In his report to the Conservative Party’s Economic Reconstruction Group in 1977, Nicholas Ridley wrote thatdenationalisation should not be attempted by frontal attack but by preparation for return to the private sector by stealth. We should first pass legislation to destroy the public sector monopolies. We might also need to take power ...”

“... did much more than either Souter or Gloag for Stagecoach. Margaret Thatcher and her eager disciple Nicholas Ridley privatised the National Bus Company in 1985. The ‘thinking’ behind this measure came from organisations like the Centre for Policy Studies and the Adam Smith Institute. To the boffins there the publicly-owned National Bus Company was a ...”

“... be nearer the mark – or better still, Conservative Party Election Manifesto. Which brings me to Nicholas Ridley’s contribution to the same debate. Like Mr Anderson, he was a devotee of Mrs Thatcher. But he hasn’t found it quite so easy to switch his loyalties to her successor. He continues to smoulder with hatred for the ‘lesser’ people in the ...”

“... very often) he emerges as a crusted reactionary, a Thatcherite to beat all Thatcherites. He loves Nicholas Ridley and the Poll Tax, favours identity cards for football supporters, detests trade unions which behave like trade unions and not as satraps of the employers. He constantly rants against ‘NHS officials, teachers and all who would dip their ...”

“... probably picked up from a newspaper or radio interview. He was dead within a year. Unlike Mr Nicholas Ridley, who recently cracked that he was not resigning to spend more time with his loved ones. Jane Austen’s attachments were less self-deceiving, and in her art she preferred to define the limits of friendship. Even the simple Catherine of ...”

“... the nature of the infection was understood, and led to ‘nimbying’ (the verbal felicity of Nicholas Ridley, and his personal commitment to the attitude, have given us this acronym for the ‘not in my backyard’ syndrome). Linda Bryder shows how a Welsh holiday village was able in the 20th century to resist having a sanatorium set up near its ...”

“... to hope that Argentina would be in too much of a mess itself to cause trouble in the Malvinas. Nicholas Ridley, in his first job as a junior Foreign Office minister, saw the FO’s leaseback proposition to its end, visiting the Falklands to test its possibilities and then being torn to pieces by the all-party Falklands lobby in the House of ...”

“... the imagination. The single-track privatiser in Downing Street herself appointed the ludicrous Nicholas Ridley (now let loose on an even wider stage) to reproduce in the national bus network an unregulated free-for-all: at least bus operators do not lay lines or make much of their stations, but the hopelessly uneconomic railway network which the 20th ...”

“... bracing truths of her uncompromising vision? John Major talks of a nation at ease with itself, and Nicholas Ridley told Newsnight: ‘The British want a rest. They don’t want to have everything turned upside down, they want a quiet time. I’m not saying this is an admirable quality of the British, because that’s why we keep falling behind, but ... if ...”

“... of the finished Supergun were finally seized by Customs at Teesport, James was surprised to hear Nicholas Ridley, the Secretary of State for Trade and Industry, tell the House of Commons that the Government knew nothing about the Supergun contract – given that he had reported it seven months earlier. James reckons that what he calls ‘the ...”

“... one-nation Tories – Kenneth Clarke, Michael Heseltine, Ian Gilmour – but also Keith Joseph and Nicholas Ridley. The politics of the Tory left were actually advanced in various factional groupings and dining clubs, such as Nick’s Diner, the Lollards and the Tory Reform Group.The term, however, remains a well-understood code in the party for a ...”

“... Eighties was hostile to the conservationist cause; and there was no greater enemy of heritage than Nicholas Ridley at the Department of the Environment. On the Continent, the outstanding model of how to preserve an ancient city in modern conditions remained Communist-run Bologna; and when it came to the meticulous conservation of aristocratic buildings ...”

“... of living an ancient life. We do not know whether Hugh Latimer really said to his friend Nicholas Ridley, when the two were burned at Oxford in October 1555, ‘Be of good comfort, master Ridley, and play the man. We shall this day light such a candle, by God’s grace, in England, as I trust shall never be ...”